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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/vulture-capitalists-maui-indigenous-community-fights-land-grabs-wildifres">middleeasteye.net</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">‘Vulture capitalists’: Maui’s indigenous community fights land grabs after wildfires</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">By Umar A Farooq - September 27, 2023<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p>The
fires were still raging when families in Lahaina started receiving
messages from developers asking if they were interested in selling their
land.</p>
<p>Several residents in the town <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/08/15/maui-land-for-sale-locals-fear-they-will-be-bought-out-after-fires/70593050007/" target="_blank">told news outlets</a>
that they began to receive messages on Facebook and other platforms
from people inquiring about whether they were open to parting with their
land.</p>
<p>While the incidents made major headlines in the coming weeks and even
led to a temporary moratorium on property sales, many within Hawaii's
indigenous community, Kanaka Maoli, fear that with the fires in Maui
faded and soon with it the media coverage, developers will get back on
the hunt, targeting the victims of these fires for their land.</p>
<p>"These vulture capitalists, vulture developers are preying upon our
people and our connection to the land during a time when none of us have
been given time to properly grieve," said Kahala Johnson, a PhD student
at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an indigenous activist with
ancestral ties to Maui.</p>
<p>Despite all of the outrage around these recent land grabs, the
dispossession of Hawaii's land has been a part of the island's history
since the arrival of American settlers in the 19th century.</p>
<p>And even though the local indigenous population has been fighting
back against the loss of their lands, it has been an uphill and losing
battle for much of the Kanaka Maoli's history since coming under the
sphere of the United States.</p>
<p>"Today's struggle has been one where native Hawaiians who are
cognisant of these titles [to their land] - some have original documents
- have been fighting against land developers, tourists, the industrial
military complex, and other encroachments on their ancestral lands,"
Johnson told Middle East Eye.</p>
<p>"It's a very complicated, multi-layered issue, but these fires add
another element to this. Capitalists, both local and international, are
trying to once again challenge these claims to the land."</p>
<div>
<p><img src="https://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/maui-relief-august-2023-afp.jpg" width="399" height="225" alt="Volunteers Kale Kahele (L) and Kanani Adolpho help organise donations as volunteers load pallets of supplies and aid donations flown in from the Hawaiian island of Kauai at the Kahului airport cargo terminal in the aftermath Maui wildfires on 13 August 2023." class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;"></p>
Volunteers Kale Kahele (L) and Kanani Adolpho help organise
donations flown in from the Hawaiian island of Kauai at the Kahului
airport on 13 August 2023 (AFP)</div><span></span><p><span></span></p>
<p><span></span>Johnson
and other indigenous activists are working hastily to not only combat
the real estate companies looking to profit off of the tragedy but also
inform their own people about their legal rights to the land.</p>
<p>While the US has certain rights and regulations regarding private
property, Hawaii is a complex situation since Washington annexed the
island nation in 1898. Indigenous people have for decades been fighting
for recognition of their own land rights that were created prior to
annexation.</p>
<p>For Johnson, the best way forward is to help the people of Maui understand the full extent of their land rights.</p>
<p>"I hope to hold these people accountable, but I also hope to have our
people be given the information they need to fight against these kinds
of intrusion."</p>
<h3>Severing indigenous connections to the land</h3>
<p>Hawaii was a sovereign nation until the 1890s when a group of
American missionaries who ran plantations in the country overthrew the
island's ruler, Queen Liliuokalani.</p>
<p>In the lead-up to that moment, the leaders of Hawaii were forced to
grapple with the issue of how to protect their land. Prior to being
introduced to capitalism through the American settlers, the islanders
did not have a concept of private property.</p>
<p>"We didn't have structures of property ownership, instead it was more
of a stewardship arrangement between chiefs and commoners," Johnson
said.</p>
<p>Eventually, through this American encroachment, the island's leaders
came up with the Mahele system, which mixed together traditional
concepts around private ownership and the people's relationship with the
land.</p>
<div>
<p><img src="https://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/maui-map-afp.jpg" width="376" height="399" alt="Map of Maui showing burnt areas from 4-11 August, 2023, as well as urban areas." class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;"></p>
Map of Maui showing burnt areas from 4-11 August 2023, as well as urban areas (AFP)<span></span></div>
<p>In 1848, King Kamehameha III introduced the Great Mahele, which
divided up Hawaii's land and gave native Hawaiians the right to own
land. The king kept one-third of the lands which were deemed the
crownlands, while allowing Hawaiians to apply for land titles.</p>
<p>"Some of the Hawaiian leaders saw this privatisation of land as a means to fend off some of the land grabs," Isaki told MEE.</p>
<p>Indigenous leaders also made a decision in the introduction of the
Mahele system, in which land passed down in a family would be equally
divided amongst all children in the family, making it difficult for
outsiders to obtain land on the islands.</p>
<p>"Our leaders in the Hawaiian kingdom, they did not introduce a
patrilineal or matrilineal system [of inheritance]. Instead, the
interests in the lands would be divided amongst the next generation -
the children and grandchildren," Johnson said.</p>
<p>However, following the American settlers' overthrow of Queen
Liliuokalani, Hawaii's native population suffered a multigenerational
loss in education and culture and many Hawaiians these days are not
familiar with inheritance laws. And Hawaii's crown lands were made a
part of the public domain, and began <a href="https://files.hawaii.gov/dcca/reb/real_ed/re_ed/ce_prelic/land_in_hawaii.pdf" target="_blank">being sold off</a> to raise money.</p>
<p>"I've heard of people getting drafted into the US military in the
early 20th century - Hawaiian farmers - to get them off the land," Isaki
said.</p>
<p>"There is a colony of people with Hansen's disease. And there are
also people who say that none of them had Hansen's disease or leprosy
and they were carted off to get them off the land. There were a lot of
shady, shady land transfers."</p>
<p>Many developers were also been able to purchase entire swaths of land
by only purchasing titles from individual family members, according to
Johnson.</p>
<p>"A lot of our people are uninformed about this. Developers will gain
one family member's interest and then claim total interest in the land."</p>
<p>To fight against these land grabs, members of the Kanaka Maoli have
waged a myriad of legal battles in Hawaiian and US courts. Isaki has
worked on a number of these cases, including one that she helped win in
2017, helping a native Hawaiian family <a href="https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/local-news/2017-07-06/reclaiming-ancestral-lands-in-post-plantation-hawai%CA%BBi" target="_blank">retain the rights</a> to their land.</p>
<h3>Billions injected into Maui real estate</h3>
<p>The community of Lahaina, a town located on the coast of Hawaii's
second-largest island Maui, like others on the island, witnessed one of
the worst fires in the archipelago's history last month.</p>
<p>The official death toll has been placed at 97, while thousands of
others have been displaced. More than 86 percent of the 2,200 structures
destroyed in the fires were residential.</p>
<p>In addition to being a doctoral student, Johnson is also a part of
the Maui Medic Healers Hui, a grassroots organisation working on the
ground to support the ongoing relief efforts for the victims of the
fires.</p>
<p>The group, which consists of members of Maui's indigenous community,
has been working since the first day of the fires to provide emergency
supplies and whatever else victims need.</p>
<p>Within days, word had begun to spread across the community that some people were getting calls inquiring about their land.</p>
<p>"My initial reaction should have been shock, but as a political
science student in indigenous politics, I had an idea of similar
incidents that have happened in the past across different native
populations," Johnson told MEE.</p>
<p>"I knew that these folks would come in and vulture around and prey upon my people and other local families in the area."</p>
<p><em>Left: A picture of one of Maui's coastlines (AFP) Right: A
picture showing the wreckage left by the wildfires in Maui in August
2023 (AP)</em></p>
<p>Maui is the second-largest of Hawaii's islands and is home to a famed
and picturesque coastline that brings in tourists from all over the
world. For the same reasons tourists flock to the island, so have a
number of billionaires, resorts and agricultural companies, who all own
land on the island.</p>
<p>Tourism <a href="https://www.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2023/02/2-9m-visitors-to-maui-spent-5-69b-in-2022/" target="_blank">brings in</a> millions of visitors to Maui each year, and brought in <a href="https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/travel/maui-residents-reckon-with-how-much-tourism-they-wantand-how-quickly-cc576735" target="_blank">$11 billion</a> in the first half of this year alone.</p>
<p>Many prominent individuals own land on Maui, including Oprah Winfrey,
Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos, and Oracle executive Larry Ellison. This
has also led to a major backlash of its own, especially after Oprah and
Dwayne Johnson - two American billionaires - were rebuked for asking for
people to donate money to a relief fund they created.</p>
<p>Some of the biggest purchasers of land, however, are investment and
development firms. According to the most recent report on the Hawaii
government's website, one of the largest landowners in Maui is a
commercial real estate company - Alexander and Baldwin. The company owns
about one-seventh of the total island's land, according to the 2017 <a href="https://files.hawaii.gov/dbedt/economic/databook/2021-individual/06/060721.pdf" target="_blank">report</a>.</p>
<p>"There are billions and billions of dollars being injected into real
estate through hedge funds, pension funds, large international
investments, agencies, finance developments," Bianca Isaki, a lawyer and
community activist in Maui, told MEE.</p>
<p>"With all this money, coming in, everything gets very expensive. And
that's also driving the housing crisis. So that's also why people might
want to grab the land."</p>
<h3>Hawaii and Palestine</h3>
<p>On 9 September, the Maui Medic Healers Hui hosted an online Zoom call
with Palestinian activists and academics. The session was part academic
and educational, and part of it was a healing circle meant to unite
over a common sense of grief.</p>
<p>Hawaii is not viewed by the general American public as an issue of
settler-colonialism, but the academic space to discuss its history of
colonialism is growing both in the state and internationally.</p>
<p>Hawaiian academics have also sought to connect more with members of
the Palestinian community as a means of solidarity and connecting over a
shared experience.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>'Palestinians and native Hawaiians have quite different histories.
But we do share a great deal as well as including the violence of
settler colonialism'</p>
<p><em>- Rana Barakat, Birzeit University</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>"My time with Kanaka Maoli in Hawaii is the first time I think I ever
really viscerally felt, outside of the Arab world, solidarity from
others for Palestine," Nour Joudah, an assistant professor at the
University of California Los Angeles, said during the webinar.</p>
<p>In addition to using the space as a healing circle, the webinar also
served as a means for the members of the two groups of people to share
wisdoms and advice for each other's causes.</p>
<p>"Palestinians and native Hawaiians have quite different histories.
But we do share a great deal as well as including the violence of
settler colonialism," said Rana Barakat, an assistant professor of
history at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank.</p>
<p>"We can contest the same colonial apparatus, this huge historical
apparatus functions differently in different geography, but it is a real
and material monster that is driven by the fuel of our elimination."</p>
<p>The fires last month were in part <a href="https://www.reuters.com/graphics/HAWAII-WILDFIRES/DRIVERS/gdvzwwgwrpw/" target="_blank">fuelled</a>
by the abandoned sugar plantations and expansion of grasslands on Maui.
And it was one sugar plantation, Pioneer Mill, that was central in many
land cases Kanaka Maoli have been fighting.</p>
<p>"Settler colonialism did not only just devastate the islands, it
transformed the ecology, very fabric of life, that it became so
vulnerable, to destruction," said Ali Musleh, a fellow at Columbia
University's Center for Palestine Studies and professor at the
University of Hawaii at Manoa.</p>
<p>One of the central projects that activists and academics on Maui had
been focused on was the Lahaina Heritage Museum, which was home to many
of the island's historical artefacts and documents, including title
registries.</p>
<p>However, like many of the thousands of buildings on Maui, the museum
also went up in flames. It was a devastating blow to the native
community, who had worked so long against the erasure of their history
and culture.</p>
<p>"One of the things that we're working now is to try to recover the
archives as much as possible, and to replace things that were lost with
things that can be made or replicated today," Johnson said.</p>
<p>"As much as it is a huge loss, it is also a chance for us to
reconnect with who we are as a community, as a nation, as a country and
as a people."</p>
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